Marketing in times of recession (Part I)

July 24, 2018

Times are hard, the economy is in bad shape and sales are down. Usually, the first budget to get slashed is marketing, but could this be the single biggest mistakes companies make in times of recession? We look deeper into the practice of recession marketing and how to keep selling while the whole economy is going backwards.

No marketing, no sales!

If you stop marketing, you lose customers. There is no secret formula. If you think revenues are bad because people aren’t buying despite your efforts, wait until you halt them.

The key here is not to completely stop your marketing activities, it’s to refocus your budgets towards the areas of your business that are already making money. In many cases, that means focusing on your existing clients, leads, and prospects.

Focus on existing Clients

Depending on who you ask, retaining and marketing to existing to customers can cost 10-50 times less than acquiring new ones. If you have a record of transactions or a CRM or a database, start using it.

You can send sms or email campaigns, search marketing or social advertising campaigns, and many other formats. What matters is that you put your customer data to good use in order to create an immersive experience for your customers.

You can cut your outdoor advertising budget and refocus on CRM marketing, the results will be much higher and you can track them much more precisely.

Marketing to warm leads

There is potential customer data sitting somewhere in an email database you could be tapping into. These people have expressed some interest in your product or service, which means you could more easily activate them. Look into your email lists and pull up the contacts who have never made a transaction with you and give them incentive.

If you’re a brick and mortar or person-to-person service provider, you can always reach out to potential customer with a free service, free delivery, free consultation or coupon to be redeemed in person. That will help you create custom workflows for each one data you may have gathered from previous lead generation campaigns.

Sometimes it’s not about a coupon. You could run a content marketing campaign about the benefits of your services and translate the interested visitors into sales calls

Treating audiences as prospects

If you haven’t started recording your website visitors as audiences in Facebook and Adwords/Analytics you should. But why? Because prospect who have been to your website are 3 times more likely to click on an ad from you.

That’s why we launch Remarketing campaigns. If you’re doing your content marketing. Search engine optimization, and digital ads strategy properly, your website visitors should be people potentially interested in your product or service. Using cookies, Facebook and Google can serve ad campaigns to your anonymous website visitors once they leave. Using targeted lead magnets, you can serve ebooks or webinars relevant to what page they visited on your website. You can read all the details in our previous article, Turning social media audiences into customers.

In the end, you need to stay on your customer’s mind and when times are hard, retreat is not the best option. The best way for you to keep money rolling in and strengthen a bond with your customers is to keep marketing, but working on personalization rather than reach.